‘No sugar-coating it’: John Pesutto on his fight to avoid bankruptcy

Former opposition leader John Pesutto doesn’t want to think about what he’ll do with his life if he’s bankrupted by his defamation loss to Liberal colleague Moira Deeming and forced out of parliament.

“That’s the reality, there’s no benefit in sugar-coating it and pretending it’s not a reality,” Pesutto told The Age at De Barcelona restaurant on Glenferrie Road in his marginal electorate of Hawthorn. “Unless I deal with this, we’re dealing with a byelection.”

Former opposition leader John Pesutto is fighting to remain in parliament.Credit: Wayne Taylor

The Federal Court in December ordered he pay Deeming more than $315,000 in damages for repeatedly and falsely implying she associated with neo-Nazis. On Friday, he was ordered to also shoulder $2.309 million worth of her legal costs.

All up, he needs to find about $3 million, including outstanding costs of his own.

The figure puts him on the brink of bankruptcy, which would disqualify him from being a member of parliament. Under this scenario, Pesutto would be forced out and a byelection called.

Pesutto won’t appeal against the costs order. Instead, he’s moving at a “frenetic pace” in an increasingly despairing fight to find the money.

Moira Deeming re-enters the party room on December 27 last year.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

His supporters have raised about $125,000 since launching a crowdfunding page on Friday, and he’s separately secured $400,000-$500,000 in funds.

He has to remain optimistic, he says, so he hasn’t considered what life could look like on the other side if he can’t come up with the money.

“I honestly don’t know, and I kind of don’t want to turn my mind to that. Because it’s in my nature, and my ethos is just to give it everything and to try to avoid that scenario,” Pesutto said.

“I’ve had my ups and downs and fights and wins and losses over the years. But if I make it through this one, I think this would be the comeback of comebacks if I pull this off.”

Pesutto has had no luck asking the Victorian Liberal Party to step in — “they made it clear they weren’t” — but has formally asked associated entity the Cormack Foundation, which has previously rejected informal approaches. Party sources do not expect the foundation to step in but Pesutto said he remained hopeful.

“I think people are now realising, ‘OK, we have to decide: do we want to contribute to avoid a byelection, or do you want a byelection?’” Pesutto said.

Opposition Leader Brad Battin – who overthrew Pesutto in the days after Christmas – refused to be drawn into the saga on Monday and would not say whether he’d make any donation to Pesutto’s cause.

“I’m very clear,” Battin said. “I’m keeping all my confidential conversations with my colleagues confidential.”

Defending Hawthorn could cost the Liberal Party upwards of $500,000. Losing the seat, held on a tight 1.7 per cent margin, would push the opposition further from its path to government.

Deeming supporters sheet blame for a possible byelection on Pesutto, given the costs stem from his defamatory comments two years ago after she helped organise a Let Women Speak rally that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.

Deeming has always denounced Nazism, and rejects that her cause is anti-trans. The Age contacted Deeming on Monday for comment.

Pesutto has been criticised within the party for allowing the action to get to court, but insists he did everything to settle.

“The idea that I didn’t try to settle is nonsense. And I feel strongly about this ... The idea that I wouldn’t want to settle that is preposterous.”

Both parties exchanged offers and Pesutto said he was always willing to compromise.

“But every offer I was required to consider always came with conditions that were either outside of my ability to give [which several Liberal sources have previously said included her guaranteed return to the party room], or were just not reasonable at the time.”

Deeming was ultimately returned to the parliamentary Liberal Party in December in the weeks after she won the Federal Court case.

Pesutto said another offer would have required him to accept all 67 defamatory imputations, the vast majority of which were found not to have been carried by the Federal Court.

He won’t concede now that perhaps he should have accepted the offer.

“No one can predict what a court is going to do. So to be fair, you’ve got to always realise it’s easy in hindsight to look back.”

Pesutto knows he’s made mistakes but says the opposition had to prioritise bread-and-butter issues and avoid distraction.

“Looking back, the events of March 2023 were early in my leadership off the back of three election losses,” Pesutto said. “I acknowledge I could have done things different. There are a million different things I could have done. I know in fairness, you can say, ‘Well, hindsight is great’. But I do acknowledge I could have done things better and taken a different approach.”

“When I became leader, we’d just lost our third thumping election loss. Third.

“I’ve always believed that the party can only succeed if it represents the full diversity of Victorians. You can’t win 45 seats or more to form a government without doing that. If you narrowcast your messaging – that explains why we’ve lost three elections. So we have to be broad-based. We have to be mainstream, and most importantly, we have to focus on those issues people are actually concerned about in their daily lives.”

He said Battin was continuing that work and shared this belief.

“The question you’ve always got to ask yourself is: ‘Do I believe in the party’s mission?’ And for me, I do believe in the party’s mission,” Pesutto said.

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